Alignment and Ergativity in New Indo-Aryan Languages by Saartje Verbeke PDF

The ebook presents an outline of the alignment styles present in smooth Indo-Aryan languages. The research of the styles of case marking and contract ends up in a balanced view at the proposal of ergativity and evaluates its price for typological linguistics. The e-book deals an in depth dialogue of past techniques to ergativity. It analyzes 4 Indo-Aryan languages - Asamiya, Nepali, Rajasthani and Kashmiri - at the foundation of textual content corpora. Examples from different Indo-Aryan languages also are adduced. The booklet is a radical synchronic examine of alignment styles in Indo-Aryan languages.

Quantity is an immense learn area in semantics, syntax and morphology. even if, no present thought of quantity is appropriate to all 3 fields. during this paintings, the writer argues unified concept isn't just attainable, yet invaluable for the learn of common Grammar. via insightful research of unusual information, the writer exhibits that one and an identical characteristic set is implicated in semantic and morphological quantity phenomena alike, with syntax performing because the conduit among the 2.

Drawing at the conceptual gear of cognitive grammar, this article goals to carry order into the array of makes use of via offering a unified semantic characterization of the dative case which subsumes either "lexically ruled" and "free" datives.

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E. by the distinction between intransitive (one-place), transitive (two-place) and ditransitive (three-place) verbs”. He identifies S, A and O in the same way as Comrie (1978) and Dixon (1979). As many scholars before him, Bickel (2011) observes that the identification of grammatical relations is a complicated matter both cross-linguistically and language-internally. Even within one language, one can find different types of alignment patterns. For instance, S and O can be marked identically, as in an erga- 26 Theoretical preliminaries tive pattern, although the verb agrees with S and A, as in the accusative pattern.

Nichols 1990; Mithun 1991). In an active-stative construction, the semantics of the verb determines the argument coding. , ‘dance’, ‘jump’ and most transitive verbs), S is coded in the same way as A. , ‘fall’, ‘sleep’), S is coded in the same way as O. , whether S is agentive or patientive) determine the coding; for instance, in John falls, John may fall either intentionally, to draw attention, or John may accidentally stumble and fall (cf. DeLancey 1981; McGregor 2009: 487). ⁶ In summary, due to the attestation of ergative and semantic alignment, the terms “subject” and “object” can no longer be used to indicate core arguments of a clause.

Therefore, it is more likely that they are marked, for instance with an ergative case. Their occurrence as patients, though, is considered to be entirely natural, and they are expected to remain unmarked in this function. Nevertheless, recent typological studies have criticized and modified the “potentiality of agency” hypothesis in several respects. Two particular crosslinguistic phenomena were instrumental for the criticism, differential object marking and differential subject marking. 2 Differential object marking: the markedness discussion Differential object marking (DOM) has been explicitly explored in the literature since Payne (1980) and Bossong (1985), who described DOM in Iranian languages.